


Endymion

by Ellerigby13



Series: love lives beyond the tomb [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Penny Dreadful (TV), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Victorian, Angst, Drug Use, F/M, Monsters, Pining, Requited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:14:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27522100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellerigby13/pseuds/Ellerigby13
Summary: Victor probes the universe for the solution to science's greatest and only question: how to split the veil between life and death.His hopeless love for Darcy Lewis falls to the wayside, and then...it doesn't.
Relationships: Victor Frankenstein & Dr. Henry Jekyll, Victor Frankenstein/Darcy Lewis
Series: love lives beyond the tomb [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960432
Comments: 14
Kudos: 11





	1. Endymion

**Author's Note:**

> Yup. I'm still here. Join me in the madness with [this AU playlist.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0wDXGx5zyd3hftB5Q5raAq?si=snV2QjslTjWRzLqhdZfXlA)

_ “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: _ _  
_ _ Its loveliness increases; it will never _ _  
_ _ Pass into nothingness; but still will keep _ _  
_ _ A bower quiet for us, and a sleep _ _  
_ _ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” _ _  
_ _ \- “Endymion, Book 1” - John Keats _

There were only two facts about which Victor Frankenstein had always been one hundred percent certain: one was that he had a fascination with death, which later in life he might call a passion and an innovation, the revolution of mankind. The second, which as a doctor he should have viewed as anticlimactic, as it added nothing to his science, nothing to his ambition...was that he was undeniably, impossibly in love with his childhood companion Darcy Lewis.

As the sky began to turn dark that fateful day toward the end of the summer before his next term at the Victoria University, Victor watched from the corner of his vision as Darcy let her hand fall between them, palm falling face-up. He flickered his line of sight back up to the skies of the countryside, as if he could make up for his indiscretion by searching for the star Darcy had just been trying to name, his heart beating out a rapid tattoo as it prodded him to reach for her hand, bring it to his lips. He could only wish that he were so bold.

She had asked him if Manchester was beautiful. It was; but as beautiful as it was to explore his own dreams and ambitions, to peal across the countryside with the freedom to dig through the layers and realms of medicine and the slender silken curtain between life and death, there was also the matter of the fact that he couldn’t look at her now, her skin aglow in the moonlight. For if he did, he might never return to school, or the tomes that held his instruction, what one might call his religion.

If he lost himself in Darcy, he might never conquer death.

Foolishly, lovingly, he let his head fall to his right, to be captured in the burning honesty of her crystal blue gaze. “Not nearly so beautiful as here.”

Her breath hitched. She might not have noticed it, but the blossoming glow of her cheeks lit up the whole of her face. If not for the incessant stammering of his heart beneath his sternum, he thought of shifting to his forearm, letting himself frame her resplendent figure with his own, lowering so he might rest a kiss to her lips and drink her in until they were one. He knew he was blushing, too, the fire in his bones as much a part of him as his very name.

Before he could stop either of them, she had placed her hand against his, sliding her fingers between his. Her free hand pressed her father’s telescope to her bosom. “When you go back for good, promise you’ll take me away, Victor. So I can learn, too.”

Victoria was no school of astronomy, nor any sort of ambition that might guide her to her precious stars, the constellations which danced so far in the distance with no thought of the two of them, or their humble existence on this desperately tiny blue planet. But if it pleased her, if it could draw that smile from those sublimely luscious pink lips, he would promise her anything she asked.

“I will,” he heard himself saying, his fingertips ablaze with energy as they pressed down into her knuckles. Like clockwork, the corners of her lips turned up and even with her eyes closed, Darcy Lewis was the most radiant sight he had ever seen, like one pale peony reflecting back the cool and indifferent love of the moonlight with a passion that was uniquely her own.

Her mother came calling not long after, her rough Gaelic cutting through the night with a sort of musicality he wished he could swallow in the darkness. And for one fragile moment, as if they could hide themselves among the fields that divided his family from hers, Darcy lay her head back into the cornflowers, her lips parted, the pulse point at the base of her jaw flashing a pale blue in the moonbeams. She met his gaze one last time, something in her eyes so transparently, perfectly truthful, that it made him gulp down the tension he felt bubbling from his own belly.

And then, with a gleeful smile that behaved as if it belonged on her lips, she released her hold on his hand and sprung to her feet, retreating back toward the dirt path that slinked through the doorway of a finely crafted stone fencing that separated her home from his.

His father wouldn’t come calling for him in a similar way, but Victor crept back up the staircases of the Frankenstein Manor far past midnight all the same. That night he drowned his lust in a fist curled beneath his bedsheets, silent enough that he might not feel guilty for casting such sinful desires on the only person he could love so purely.

Over the next month, nearly every time he saw her Victor thought of taking her by the hand and kissing her until neither of them could see straight, but his cowardice overtook the churning desire which resided in the bottom of his gut. She was too good, with dreams too kind and clean of the hubris with which he tainted his own, to be lowered to the likes of him for too long. To even allow her to lay her lovely slender hand into his was fatal enough.

Still, they spent almost every day together until he returned to Victoria, daring each other to compose a sonnet based on the other’s passions, gazing upon the starlight when they could afford to be missed from their respective homesteads. Not that Father much noticed when Victor went missing; too busy with William’s polo, Geoffrey’s sailing, Edward’s wrestling, those interests that permitted him to redirect his attention from his least favoured son, this invisibility at least allowed Victor a little privacy.

This much was valuable on the muggy day that blended summer into fall, when Victor’s father instructed him to take the best carriage along to the train station, so the young Miss Lewis might be more comfortable as she accompanied him. Naturally, instead of occupying the spacious seat across from one another, they fell into place side-by-side, taking each other’s hand as if it were their lifeblood.

“I’m sure I can smuggle you in,” he insisted softly, feeling his Adam’s apple tremble up his throat while the carriage bounced over the gravel until it turned to cobblestone. “We would have to find you some men’s clothes, a hat that could hold your hair if you don’t care to cut it…”

Her smile was so soft and so radiant it glowed through more than her face, lighting her entire figure. “I suppose I wouldn’t fit properly in your clothes.” His blush betrayed him, but thankfully she averted her eyes into her lap, still smiling. “I’d suggest we share, but...I think you’re a bit...statuesque to be the same size as me.”

“I suppose you’re right. We’d have to find you a fine clothier in Manchester to accent you perfectly. What would you have me call you? Your astronomer’s nom de plume?”

She leaned into his shoulder, and he could hear the charming grin in her voice. “Gilbert Galileo. Your long lost cousin.”

For the first time in many long years, he laughed so hard the noise disturbed his sinuses, making him snort like a pig.

The moment the carriage pulled up to the station, he could nearly feel the air cool and stiffen, as if the world itself were trying to tug her hand away from his. She held it until he was given charge of his trunk, one foot on the platform and the other on the train.

“You’ll write to me,” she whispered, never once tearing her kind and defiant blue gaze away from him. “As often as you can, and tell me every discovery you make.” Her thumb skimmed across the cleft in his chin, and he felt something flutter unceasingly inside of him, even after she’d taken her hand away. “You promise?”

“I will, of course,” he said, before the high whistle of the train signaled his imminent departure, and the conductor, a burly sort of fellow, aimed his head toward the car. Even as she grew smaller and more distant, as the wheels chugged forward and he was forced to find an empty compartment so he might look out the window at her, Darcy still smiled, as if her smile was her promise to him: that she would hold him to returning to her, taking her with him when he left for good.

It was a promise they both would break.

* * *

“Who is that you’re writing?” Henry asked him, not looking up from the thick reams of his textbook. Victor supposed it would only be a matter of time before he was found out; what time he didn’t spend working was consumed only by sleep, food, and the sparse moments in which he could read the letters from Darcy or pen his own in response. “Seems to be all you look forward to, apart from playing with cadavers.”

“A friend,” Victor said simply, not once permitting the flickering of his heartbeat to betray the coolness of his voice. Still, something strummed on the nerve between them, Henry’s waiting indicating all it needed to. “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

There was a smirk in his voice when he responded again, but once more Victor refused to give him the satisfaction of his gaze. “A woman? You’ve more mystery than I thought, Dr. Frankenstein.”

“She is a  _ friend _ .” His hand stuttered over the already untidy ‘o’ which he was carving onto the page. “A childhood friend who seeks a future not unlike our own. She wishes me to tell her all I learn from the schooling that is, presently, unavailable to her sex.”

“I see.” Jekyll’s tone was even, flat; Victor listened as he flipped casually through the leaves of his book. “And you have great concern for  _ all  _ things...available to her sex?”

The burning of his cheeks didn’t stop a roguish smile from crossing his lips. He set down his pen at last, only when Henry too allowed himself to begin to laugh. “Fuck off.”

Henry Jekyll was a tidy enough flatmate, an ingenious chemist in the making, and above all, a good friend. He knew tragic beginnings just as well as Victor did, carrying with him the same traumas of a mother lost too soon, a father who ignored him, packed in with the prejudices of their jeering classmates. Unlike himself, though, Henry had a backbone, and the fists to match; on one of their first meetings, as Victor returned to their flat between his classes, he’d discovered his acquaintance lunging for a towheaded lad about twice his size, a small crowd of students gathered to laugh and leer while they watched.

“I had him,” Henry had insisted afterwards, his eyes still dark with that poisonous passion as Victor tended to the swollen gash on his left cheek. “You would have encouraged me, too, had you heard what he said - ”

“Undoubtedly I would have. And undoubtedly, like you, I would have been beaten senseless.” He tipped Henry’s chin to the side to keep the thin stream of blood from spilling anymore onto his collar. “There will come a day your temerity far outweighs your intelligence. And the fists of your opponent will far outweigh your own.”

“Do not speak to me of my intelligence,” Henry spat, jerking away from Victor’s hand. The venom in his voice seemed to explode from somewhere deep inside him, as though he’d been reserving his anger for exactly this moment, more so than with the boys in the courtyard. “Men like you have always had your education served to you on a silver platter; it is no wonder your intelligence is, quite marginally, the most valuable part of your identity. Just as that  _ buffoon’s  _ strength is the most valuable part of his.”

Victor had frozen, feet nearly fixed to the spot with his surprise. A pause fell between them, before he felt a cool anger of his own prickling up from the bottom of his ribcage. But before he could let any poison of his own fester on his tongue, he watched the contorting muscles in Henry’s face tighten, as if in wait to reload with his response. He drew in a deep breath, closing his eyes, and then let it loose once more, parcelling out the small doses of ice he would permit himself to pass through his words. “I am not your enemy, Henry. Brutes like he will never amount to the greatness that you or I will bring to our world. Do not allow him to turn us against one another.”

It seemed the right thing to say. Jekyll’s shoulders loosed their tension, his eyes falling downcast. He realized that he’d been holding in a rageful breath, and sighed it out to empty, a tic flexing in his jaw.

“I’m sorry, Victor. Sometimes I...feel that of all the things I will inherit from my father, his temper is the ugliest and of course the first.”

“At least with your temper you shall inherit his title. As far as my father is concerned, my brothers are his only sons.” Victor rolled his sleeves up once more, and this time Henry allowed him to tend his wounds without struggle.

Autumn faded into winter, muted and solemn with the wind and falling snow. Though his professors seemed more preoccupied with opining on their theories and dissertations than actually teaching, he found that he’d learned enough to be offered a position as an apprentice under Doctor Rathbone to keep him from going home for Christmas. On the bright side, this meant he wouldn’t have to face his father’s unending disapproval. It also meant he wouldn’t see Darcy until the following summer. Her return letter from his announcement was the fastest one he’d received yet, containing a sweet smelling lock of brown hair tucked in between folds of paper.

_ My dearest Victor, _

_ While I cannot with words express my disappointment not to spend Christmas with you, I offer my most heartfelt congratulations on your apprenticeship! You’ve earned it, and I am so bloody proud of you. Doctor Frankenstein has such a lovely ring to it...I cannot wait to storm my way into an operating theatre to watch you work. _

_ There is little to report here. Mother has tried twice now to marry me off to Father’s distant cousin Duncan, and though I know she only wants me well cared for, I cannot bear thinking of a lifetime joined with a man I do not love. If she continues to pursue this fruitless venture, I have developed the admittedly childish plan of running away to London - I can only hope that there is where I escape into my future, not Mother’s. Or, if you like, our future: just as I cannot imagine a lifetime with a man I do not love, I also cannot imagine a lifetime without you by my side. I hope this is not too bold a thing to write to you, but by this point...I feel you cannot be unaware of what affections I possess for you, my dear friend. _

_ Forgive me for any transgression I might have committed against you. As my dear Austen has said and as I clumsily paraphrase, if you object to me feeling this way, give the word and I shall never again mention the subject. _

_ I do hope to hear from you soon. Please tell me of all your adventures with Doctor Rathbone, as I’m sure there will be many, and they shall be full of excitement. _

_ Yours most sincerely, _

_ Darcy Lewis _

Toward the end of the second paragraph, he felt his throat grow heavy, and splayed his fingers across the indents made by her pen. It was as if he could touch her by holding her words in his hand, and that delightfully frightening feeling that she might think of him in the same way he had so long thought of her.

“Careful, friend,” Henry advised as he prepared to exit the dormitory for Christmas break. He had earned an apprenticeship of his own, with a talented chemist in Bristol. “You might find yourself spending your first paycheck on an engagement ring.”

Surprising himself, Victor smiled, a rather unsurprising flush filling his cheeks. He’d never admit to it, but Jekyll’s mention hadn’t been the first thought he’d had of asking for Darcy’s hand. “Perhaps I might.”


	2. Ozymandias

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Victor becomes a touch closer to the Frankenstein we see in the show.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise, bitch: I'm back for these two, for some reason.

_ “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; _ _  
_ _ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! _ _  
_ _ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay _ _  
_ _ Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare _ _  
_ _ The lone and level sands stretch far away.’” _ _  
_ _ \- “Ozymandias” - Percy Bysshe Shelley _

The carriage ride from Victoria to Doctor Rathbone’s practise was a short one, but it provided Victor plenty of time to ruminate over the sweetnesses in Darcy’s letter, to read and re-read every perfectly crafted word. He had responded in kind before loading the few contents of his flat into his trunk and calling for a carriage to take him to his temporary new home.

_ My dearest Darcy, _

_ Do not for one instant believe that you owe me any sort of apology for your feelings. It is a most treasured privilege to be held in your esteem, and an unspeakable joy to know that my affections appear to be matched. I am the one who should be sorry for not coming home to you as expected. Truth be told, there is little left for me at my father’s homestead but the fact that it is located beside your own. _

_ London seems a perfectly suitable place for us to run away, not at all a childish dream. We can shuffle ourselves into the coziest (and as such, cheapest) apartment we can find, and while I pursue my doctoring you will set up the only observatory in London that might cut through the hellish fog and factory smoke. You are too bright, too vibrant, too intelligent not to pursue your dreams in the heart of the city. _

_ I shall be heading into Manchester shortly; let me know of any gifts you might like me to bring you when I do return next. I may still be a poor man to this day, but soon I shall have the means to present you something worthy of your person, something that glistens nearly as much as your smile. For now, I leave you with a meager offering that I hope shall still convey my adoration: the good Christina Rossetti. _

_ “Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’ _ _  
_ _ Both have the strength and both the length thereof, _ _  
_ _ Both of us, of the love which makes us one.” _

_ Yours, yours, yours, _ _  
_ _ Victor Frankenstein _

He felt ridiculous pressing his lips to the seal, but as all are blinded in the throes of love, did so anyway before he dropped it in the post. With painstaking care, he outlined his new address on the cover of the envelope, and once it had made a satisfactory sound at the bottom of the postman’s bag, he smiled brightly at the jeweler’s store just down the street.

Doctor Jeremiah Rathbone was a tall, proud man with a thick, shiny monocle and heavily pockmarked cheeks. He did not move to shake Victor’s hand when welcoming him into the Rathbone Manor, the outside coated in withering vines and the inside with dust. Instead, he nodded wordlessly to his man, eyes still locked imperiously over Victor, and bade that the servant take care of his new apprentice’s belongings, and show him to his new quarters.

“Our schedule at the practise is an unconventional one; we begin at ten o’clock in the evening, and complete our shift at six in the morning. You will clean yourself as soon as we return, and then adjourn to bed until the early afternoon. We shall take tea at two o’clock, continue your studies and enjoy the grounds until dinner at seven o’clock. After dinner, we shall spend the remainder of our time before our shift in the drawing room. I am aware that you consider yourself a man of literature?”

“That’s correct, sir. Poetry, mostly.”

“Good,” Doctor Rathbone said, straightening to his full height. He reminded Victor oddly of a stone gargoyle, though he’d never seen one up close, nor standing. “Then we shall entertain ourselves in the evenings with the exchange of poetics to begin with, along the way introducing classical literature and theatrics. The themes present in your readings will remind you why exactly you have chosen your profession.”

Rathbone leaned forward, hands behind his back, so close that Victor could nearly see his reflection in the older man’s monocle. “So when you are stained head to toe in another man’s bloody entrails, whether he be a man of fine arts and intelligence like yourself or a filthy urchin off the street, you will remember that you serve humanity in all, not only its pretty parts. You will appreciate the tragedy of every death you oversee, every patient you couldn’t save.” He stood tall once more, a thin smile spreading across his lips beneath his long, thin nose. “For now, young Mr. Frankenstein, I suggest you familiarise yourself with our grounds. Mr. Winston - please show our new tenant to his quarters.”

The estate was smaller than the one back home, but this was to be expected; with no companion or children, having married himself to his work, Doctor Rathbone needed only the space for himself and his servants. And now, of course, for Victor. The bedroom at the top of the ancient staircase looked as though it hadn’t been touched in years, a thin film of dust layered over the windowsill, which looked out over the smattering of twisted dark trees to the west. Still, the empty bookcase against the wall opposite his bed would make a fine home for the collections of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Rossetti that he had managed to stow away with him. Between the pages, he had tucked each of Darcy’s letters, so that every time he cracked open one of the spines, the gentle smell of her seemed to radiate from within his favourite poets’ best words.

_ I cannot imagine a lifetime without you by my side _ , she had written. A lifetime. The modest golden band weighed heavily in his pocket, and throughout the day, as Winston showed him around the vast and unkept grounds of the Rathbone Estate, he found himself running his fingertips over the dainty gemstone in the middle of the ring. The next time he saw Darcy, he would ask her to be his wife.

He was not meant to see her for some time. Night turned blearily into day, and as his work began with Doctor Rathbone, he began to dream of all he would do with the tools that his mentor was providing him, of passing his hand through the thin veil between life and death and bringing to resurrection the next ethereal beings to walk this Earth. Before he could fathom it, a month had passed since he had sent his letter, and the ring in its pouch began to collect dust in the top drawer of his desk.

“Is it a woman that troubles you?” Rathbone asked one morning, as the rays of sunrise peeked out from over the tree line when their carriage rolled up the pathway toward the estate. Victor didn’t have to answer before Rathbone’s mouth lifted into a severe, humourless sort of smile. “Women are a cruel mistress, Mr. Frankenstein. Weak for the sciences, more trouble than they’re worth. A distraction at best, wailing harpies at worst.”

“Is that so?” Victor retorted with a meagre smile, feeling the bags beneath his eyes grow heavier with every passing moment. “Is this why the only women on your property are the help, Doctor?”

“Such cheek, my young apprentice.” Rathbone’s monocle twinkled. “No, Mr. Frankenstein, I’ve not been long for women because of my work and the cruel mistress that she affords me.” As the carriage rolled to a stop, he unfolded a small leather tool kit which he had procured from an inner pocket of his coat, to reveal a short row of fat little syringes filled with clear liquid.

“Is that - ?”

“An old man’s useless habit.” One long, slender fingertip rapped gently on the glass of a syringe, and the two of them watched the liquid inside jiggle with Rathbone’s touch. “Better left to a proper doctor’s hands than to the vendor’s you might find in an opium den, or in the filth-ridden alleys of London. Come up to the drawing room then, lad, and I’ll give you a taste. From one proper doctor to another.”

Victor eyed the closing of the pouch and the glistening of the syringes, his heartbeat thrumming out a thrilling tattoo. Even though his father approved of very little that he was interested in, he had always behaved. Always listened, always obeyed, never broke a school rule when he could help it. The delicious pull that came with having a mentor now tell him to sink his fingers into something...maybe a little dangerous.

He loved it.

The morphine blew through his bloodstream when Rathbone pushed the plunger home for him, and he felt the rush of air colliding with his lungs as he lifted his eyes to the ceiling, his mind going soft. There was something almost uncomfortable about the first wave of it, roiling in his stomach, but his body nearly collapsed into the cushions of the drawing room seat, the back of his neck resting against its cool wood. Somewhere in the distance, he heard Rathbone give a small chuckle, and the soft clinking of glass as he put together his own dose. But Victor wasn’t long for that world.

He closed his eyes, and let the tender darkness take him.

* * *

The more he worked, the more time he spent at Doctor Rathbone’s side, and the more they grew into a friendship that exceeded the role of apprentice he sometimes forgot he had taken on. With friendship, the more they spent their free moments sliding into oblivion in the drawing room. Rathbone was schooled enough in the delicious practise of morphine, so that he held a charcoal pencil and journal lazily in his lap once he’d taken the injection and scrawled lazily the perfect translations of anatomy, human and animal. Victor watched the dark circles grow beneath his own eyes, watched his skin grow thin and pale, almost translucent in the mirror.

One morning after their shift and their partaking, Victor watched his master seem to slip from reality for a moment, exceedingly near to the precipice of death’s cruel grasp. When Rathbone shuddered awake as Victor pressed his finger into his cheek, an uprising of curiosity reared its head at the front of Victor’s mind.

Resuscitation.

He had his next epiphany that very night, as a freak storm crawled its way above the sanitarium, bolts of hot white lightning creasing across the bleak, inky sky.

Days went on to become weeks. Eventually, weeks became months. His heart didn’t have time to ache while he buried himself elbow-deep in the corpses of the recently deceased, and the morphine along with his work along with his new study calcified him to the small hovering thought that lingered always in the back of his mind.

He'd written her again a month after leaving Victoria, and twice again in the weeks following. Darcy didn’t want him. Couldn’t want him. Not for the monster that he was.

Rathbone had been right, he realised. There was no time for women, the frivolous things, in his pursuit of greatness.

He continued to feed himself this reasoning the morning that he stole his first body.

It was a middle-aged man of average stature, if a little barrel-chested, sleek, brown hair that fell to his shoulders. He’d had a massive heart attack passing through Manchester, and when he’d been brought to the sanitarium, seemed to possess no identification or next of kin to inform. Just as Victor had been digging his scalpel into the skin clinging thinly to the man’s sternum, the rattle of death shuddered through his chest, and his head fell back, eyes staring lifelessly into the ceiling.

Rathbone put his pocket mirror to the man’s mouth, and, finding no fog of his breath, sighed his disappointment. “Time of death...three seventeen. Frankenstein, help Albright transfer the body.” He met the gaze of his apprentice, who was certain that his annoyed resentment at being treated like a true underling radiated from his eyes. “Please,” Rathbone added.

Victor allowed his scalpel to clatter onto its dish a bit more loudly than usual as he proceeded around the operating table to fetch the feet while Albright took hold of the body by the underarms. The last he was meant to see of it was by the door of the sanatorium morgue.

The only place he could steal away his materials was a dark and desperate corner on the far end of Manchester. With the excuse that he was visiting a colleague from Victoria, he spent the hours before his shifts maneuvering coils, conducting autopsies, and waiting for another bout of lightning.

It arrived after he’d made off with seven bodies, both male and female, plugging and unplugging the spinal cords to brains, toying with aortic valves, imagining the nerves twitch and flicker with light. This body was not a perfect one, his handiwork rushed by the impending storm, but if it could return...if he could draw life back from the enigmatic and powerful grasp of death…

The sky cracked open, his makeshift laboratory going a blinding white. He dashed to one corner to cast upward the rigging, allow the coils to join lightning with flesh. One bolt caught the coil just as it left his hand -

The subject gasped alive, its lips sputtering for air, eyes blinking out of time with one another. Victor felt his heart jump into his throat; the dismal gasping sound which rippled through the air seemed to tear through his subject’s chest, as if it hurt him, as if the air itself was killing him.

“No - ” Victor breathed, as his subject’s gasps turned high, violent, like a scream. “No, stop it - ”

And then it was over. The rattle of death echoed through its chest again, the blood-tinged irises rolling backwards into its head to show the whites. There was no resuscitating him again.

He arrived back at Rathbone Manor moments before he and his master were meant to leave for their next shift. Victor knew that he must have looked a mess: hair unkempt, clothes sweated and slept in, deepening rings beneath his eyes. He expected Rathbone would give him a proper thrashing, scold him for his tardiness and order him up to change immediately.

He did not expect for Rathbone and Winston to be waiting for him on the front steps, one familiar trunk at their feet.

“What’s - Doctor Rathbone?”

“Unfortunately, Mr. Frankenstein, I must inform you of your imminent termination from our practise,” Rathbone announced, his mouth in a severe line. “Your things have been packed, and we shall return you to university to report to a new master at once.”

“Sir?”

“Dammit, boy,” he spat, his monocle glistening with menace beneath the rising summer sun. “You have made a  _ disaster  _ of my clinic and a  _ mockery _ of my patients. Seven deceased, missing from the morgue.  _ Seven _ . I am offering you  _ mercy _ by returning you to Victoria. You have desecrated the bodies of men and women, good men and women, with lives and families, dreams. And for what?”

“I am close to a breakthrough,” Victor said, rushed, ice prickling in the back of his neck. The last time he’d had this feeling was when his mother found him with the family dog - for a fleeting moment, he thought she would blame him, believe that he’d had something to do with it. That moment was over much more quickly than this one. “Jeremiah, I am crossing the bridges between life and death - surely you understand my ambitions.”

“It is not ambitious to crown yourself a mediocre bastard god!” Rathbone exploded at last, his face flushing dully, mottled. “We are not doctors to decide who lives, who dies, who is allowed to turn their back on whatever comes for us when we expire. We serve those in need. For God’s sake, boy, we  _ heal _ . We are  _ doctors _ .”

After all this time, treating him like a child. After giving him doses of that righteous angel, after living with him, sharing his home, knowing him and behaving like a brother, a friend, a colleague, this was how he behaved.  _ This _ was what Victor had earned.

His heartbeat thrummed in his ears. He longed to reach out and throttle Rathbone by that awful, wrinkled neck.

“Healing...is what I mean to do, you pompous, bull-headed windbag. I am  _ trying _ to heal those that we  _ couldn’t _ save!”

Rathbone took a shuddering step forward - for a moment, Victor thought he might hit him. But then he rested back on his heels, the flush draining from his face.

“Mr. Winston, please escort  _ Mister _ Frankenstein back to the university. He may continue his tutelage under another master.”

Victor didn’t speak another word on the carriage ride, until they were about to pass the train station at Manchester. “Let me off here. I can make my way on my own.”

Once Winston had disappeared from sight down the road, Victor purchased a ticket to London, his trunk at his side, and didn’t look back.


End file.
